Last Chance
by gardenofnoele
Summary: As she dies an old woman, Hermione makes a wish, resulting in the reincarnation of Ron, Harry, Ginny, and herself. She also brings back another, and it is unclear to her why. Relieved to have a second chance at living their lives, the five set out to make
1. Prologue: Hermione's Wish

It was a very late, almost two thirty in the morning, when Hermione Granger finally went to bed. She almost never went to bed this late, but she had been reading an excellent book and had lost track of time. It was a cold, dark night, and as Hermione hobbled into her bedroom, a strong, frigid breeze sent her delicate gray hair flying around her face. She struggled to close the window and shivered as she climbed into bed.

She wasn't an idiot in the slightest bit, but up until her very late eighties it had never occurred to her that she had become an incompetent old woman. She was barely able to live one day without finding herself unable to complete simple tasks that she had taken for granted when she was a very young. But then again, there were lots of things she had taken for granted as a young person. She had had so much that she longed for now…friends, for one thing.

After Hermione had graduated from Hogwarts, she had rather lost contact with Harry, Ron, and Ginny. At first they had written each other quite often, and were sometimes able to squeeze in an awkward visit here and there, but as the years progressed, the letters became fewer and fewer, until the friends had completely lost touch.

About a year before, she had begun writing letters to Ron and Harry, but she never had any response. She tried to reach Ginny as well, but none of them responded. After having sent around twenty letters collectively to her friends, her owl returned with a letters from the new inhabitants of The Burrow and Harry's place of residence telling her that all three had died, and asking her to please stop owling them.

Never having got the chance to say goodbye, Hermione attempted to regain contact with other old Hogwarts students, including Lavender, Neville, and even Draco Malfoy. All of them had passed on.

Now, lying in bed, she felt utterly alone. She wasn't married, and she didn't have any family to speak of. Upon leaving Hogwarts, she had been voted "most likely to succeed", but she didn't feel she had succeeded in any way. For that very evening, she would die alone and shivering in her bed.

Before drifting into a sleep from which she would never wake, she sighed and thought with all her heart, _I wish I had another chance._


	2. Awake

Hermione yawned as she woke up, the way she always woke up. She balled up her fists and stretched them into the air, squinting and moaning a bit at the effect of the stretch. She noticed that her hands felt different, but she wasn't entirely sure how. She opened her eyes to check.

They were free of wrinkles, and young looking. They were full of color, and they felt strong. And it wasn't the silky hangings of her bed that she saw above her, but a clear blue sky that seemed to go on forever. She looked around and sat up, and it wasn't her fine grey hair that she saw bordering her face, but her old famous bushy brown hair, frizzy and untamable.

At first it seemed to be only her in what appeared to be a field of tall grass, but when she stood up she saw a familiar shape lying in the shrubs. Harry Potter was just waking up. He opened his eyes he sat up, seeming oddly surprised to be there.

"Harry!" shouted Hermione, running towards him, and o the way treading on something that shouted, "BLODDY HELL!"

She stopped in her tracks.

"Ron?" She said, looking down at him.

"Yeah, it's me, who did you think you tripped over, Scabbers?" Ron said, indignantly.

"Well, Ronald, it's just that your dead," Hermione said.

"Oh yeah…" Ron remembered.

"That's exactly why I'm confused," Hermione told him.

"But Harry's dead too!" Ron accused.

"Yeah, I'm dead as a doornail," Harry informed her.

At that moment Ginny sat up from the grass.

"You're dead, as well!" Hermione exclaimed.

"I know I'm supposed to be dead, Hermione," Ginny said, "But the question is, why, if we are all in fact dead, do we appear to be young and alive?"

"Well I was alive to begin with," Hermione told them with pride.

They all sat in quizzical silence for a few moments before a fifth figure popped up from the grass, blonde hair swaying around his face.

"Oh, dear god, I'm stuck with you four again. Why, god, why me?" Draco Malfoy turned his face to the heavens, "If only I had asked him yesterday…we had tea and crumpets."

"Softened up a bit, haven't you Draco," Ginny said, chuckling, "tea and crumpets…"

"It's what heaven will do to you…" Draco said apologetically.

All five of them got to there feet and looked around.

"Where are we?" Ginny asked, brushing dirt from her hair.

"I'm not entirely sure…" Hermione said, but there was another thing that was bothering her.

All four of the others had been dead, and she hadn't woken up in her bed this morning. Was it possible that she was dead too? She gave a gasp of realization. The wish she had made before drifting off to sleep must have come true. This was her second chance. Except everyone knew what she had done with her first chance. Then another thing occurred to her: if she had asked for a second chance, it was apparent why Harry, Ron, and Ginny were here. But as for Draco Malfoy, Hermione couldn't thing why he might have come back with her friends.

Draco was thinking the same thing. He had been dead before, he was certain of it, and apparently so were the others. So why had he been brought back with them?

The five confused people walked towards a destination they couldn't define. They simply walked slowly, slightly in a daze past what could have been miles of greenish yellow grassy fields, until they reached a house. It was rather large, made of red brick with big, white framed windows. The shudders on many of the windows were open, revealing gauzy white curtains that were blowing about. There was a big white front door with a heavy brass knocker on it.

For a second all five of them just stood and stared at the door. They could hear someone whistling from the window, and all of them were rather surprised when the face of Albus Dumbledore appeared in the window. They had always assumed that their professor lived at school. None of them ever thought that he had a house, and maybe a dog or a cat, too.

"Oh, hello, my friends! Do come in, I didn't expect to see you!" The old man shouted, beaming.


	3. The House

The five were happy to see the old man's twinkling smile again. It was funny, he had been an old man since they were born, and now, after they were supposed to be dead, he was still an old man.

They walked inside the house, finding the door unlocked. Dumbledore met them at the bottom of the stairs, as they stood awkwardly in the entrance room of his extravagant home.

"I can't help but notice that you were all somewhere in your nineties 5 years ago, and last time I checked you were all dead. Yet now, you stand before me, fit as a fiddle, not a day older than 25!" Dumbledore exclaimed.

"You don't miss a thing now, do you?" Ginny said, laughing.

"Yeah…we aren't quite sure how that happened," said Ron.

Hermione looked at the floor. So she _had _been dead.

"But I have a feeling that Ms. Granger does…" Dumbledore trailed off.

"I think I might have maybe…reincarnated us all or something…" She said.

"What else do you think, Ms. Granger?" Dumbledore pushed her to proceed.

"I think perhaps…I might have made a tiny little wish. As I fell asleep last night…I wished that I had a second chance to live my life, the way I wanted to live it," Hermione explained.

"Oh, I see. I might also point out that this is the first reincarnation, if that is indeed what it is, in wizard history," Dumbledore said, sounding disapproving but also slightly impressed.

"Well it was a wish, so I don't know if it was really me who did it."

"Oh, but it wasn't a wish, Ms. Granger," He said knowingly.

"But I said 'I wish that'--" But Hermione didn't finish telling them because she was cut off by Dumbledore.

"You may have said the words 'I wish' a hundred times, but the fact of the matter is that you are a very powerful which. It appears to me that you wanted your wish to come true so badly that you subconsciously created a spell to make it so. You have created life out of death, by a mere thought. I am guessing you did not even speak the words out loud."

"No, professor, I didn't," She confirmed.

"So now you have a new life, all five of you. And a chance to make everything you couldn't do before happen. Use it wisely," The old man advised them, "But that isn't really the point…I suppose you will need somewhere to live. You'll stay here. I have at least two spare rooms…one for the men and one for the women, I think."

Ron and Harry looked with disgust at Malfoy.

"Go up the stairs and to the left. The rooms are the first two on your right."

They trudged up the stairs, Harry and Ron looking entirely annoyed at their sleeping arrangements.

"I am not rooming with him," Ron hissed in Hermione's ear.

"Ron, really, how could you say that? Harry's your best friend!" Hermione said.

"Not Harry…him."

Ron nodded over to Malfoy, looking at him as if he were a piece of gum he had found stuck to the underside of a desk.

"Oh, Ronald, don't be a child."

"Fine, then! You room with him!" Ron said.

"I'm not staying with you, Herm, if he's there!" Ginny said, adding, rather apologetically, "sorry."'

"Fine, at least I can be a grown up about this." Hermione said. She had to admit she was rather upset herself, but she wasn't about to make a huge deal over staying with Malfoy, since it wasn't as if they would be there for a very long time.

When she entered the room, she saw two queen sized beds with silky pastel canopies over them. There were white armchairs in the room as well, a desk, a couch, nightstands, and lamps. The room was rather delicate looking.

Hermione heard bickering out in the hallway and caught snatches of conversation, phrases like "go" and "shut up" and "no way", before a defeated Malfoy sulked into the room and sat down on one of the beds, pushing aside the canopy.

"What, it's not like I'm happy either!" Hermione spat when he looked at her.


	4. Why Me?

Hermione and Malfoy sat on there beds, looking grudgingly across the room at each other. Hermione felt like a world class hypocrite, as she had said to the boys that they're hatred for Malfoy was childish, and still she herself held a grudge for his behavior as a school boy.

"I never thought I'd be sharing a room with a mudblood…if my father were alive…"Malfoy said under his breath.

"Really, Malfoy, you're always saying what would happen if your father were here! Can't you do anything on your own? And I was wrong about you, I thought maybe you had changed, since you've been to heaven and back again, but 3 hours back from the place and you're already acting like an idiot again. What does it matter to you what's in my blood? I'm a better witch than you'll ever be!" Hermione exploded at him.

"I see you've been hiding some pent up feelings, Granger…are you going to hit me now?" He asked, daring her.

"Why don't you just call me Hermione?" she asked him

"You call me Malfoy! Did it ever occur to you that that's not my first name?"

"I'm sorry, Draco," Said Hermione.

"Don't call me Draco."

And that was the end of their conversation. A few hours later Hermione went downstairs to have a bite to eat with her friends. Draco stayed behind, saying that he wasn't hungry. After that they all went to bed.

Hermione lay awake for hours thinking about what she had done. She thought about everything possible…she wondered what the catch might be. She knew that nothing came for free. She wondered if there was something wrong with them, something that they had all left behind before returning. She wondered if there would be any negative repercussions. She was just drifting off to sleep when she heard Draco Malfoy's familiar voice, except the tone was one that was completely unexpected. Instead of sounding smooth and cruel, he sounded thoughtful, and perhaps even a bit confused.

"What exactly did you wish for again?"

"For another chance…at living my life," Hermione answered him.

"So why didn't everything just go back in time instead of us being…reborn or something?"

"I'm not sure. It does seem more likely that I would have traveled back in time and no one else would ever notice, since I have done that before…" Hermione said.

"Wow, cant you do anything the first time around?" Draco said with a chuckle.

"Ha ha ha," Hermione said in mock laughter.

"And how could that stupid old man possibly be alive! Nobody would have been surprised if he had kicked the bucket before we were born for the first time, and now we're back for a second bite at the apple and he's still alive and well. He should have been pushing up the daisies years ago." Draco said, speaking of Dumbledore.

"Come to think, I'm not sure how he's still alive…he certainly should be dead by now. It's almost as if…" She trailed off.

"As if by magic?" Draco finished for her.

"Yes, actually, I would have said that it just sounded stupid, us living in the magical world and all," Hermione explained, sounding a bit embarrassed.

"You're right, that is stupid."

Hermione was astounded. All these years Malfoy had fooled everyone into thinking he was a poor conversationalist, but this had been lovely. Hermione knew he was still the same person who hated her for her blood, hated her best friends for there nobility. She knew he hated what was right. But still, she couldn't help having more respect for him than she had had before.

They lay there in silence for what seemed like hours, until both were sure that the other was asleep. Every once and a while one of them would open their mouths to say something but think the better of it, until it was very, very late and Draco plucked up the courage to ask his final question, the one that he had been wanting to ask all along.

He took a deep breath before diving in, "Hermione?"

"Yes?"

"Why did you bring me back, too?"


End file.
